Moore neighbourhood

The Moore neighbourhood is the set of all cells that are orthogonally or diagonally-adjacent to the region of interest (the region of interest itself may or may not be considered part of the Moore neighbourhood, depending on context). For example, the Moore neighbourhood of a single cell consists of the eight cells immediately surrounding it. This neighbourhood is named after Edward F. Moore, one of the pioneers of cellular automata theory.[1] The Moore neighborhood is the neighbourhood of interest in Conway's Game of Life and all Life-like cellular automata, though there are cellular automata that use other neighbourhoods such as the 4-cell von Neumann neighborhood.

The Moore neighbourhood naturally extends to cellular automata in higher dimensions, for example forming a 26-cell cubic neighborhood for a cellular automaton in three dimensions. The number of cells in the Moore neighbourhood of a single cell in an n-dimensional cellular automaton is 3n-1 (Sloane's A024023).

The Moore neighbourhood of a cell can be thought of as the points at a Chebyshev distance of 1 from that cell.

For instance, B2-a/S12 (the Just Friends rule) indicates that a dead cell will be born with 2 neighbors, except when they are adjacent, and that a live cell will survive with 1 or 2 neighbors in any configuration.

Higher ranges

The Moore neighbourhood can also be defined with a higher range; that is, so that it captures cells that are further than one cell away from the region of interest. The standard Moore neighbourhood has range 1. The Moore neighbourhood of range 2 is the set of all cells that are orthogonally or diagonally-adjacent to the Moore neighbourhood itself. The Moore neighbourhood of range n can be defined recursively as the set of all cells that are orthogonally or diagonally-adjacent to the Moore neighbourhood of range n-1. The number of cells in the Moore neighbourhood of range n is given by (2n+1)2-1 (Sloane's A033996).